EOF - Extreme Linux: Not All That Far Out There

Your next 512-processor Linux box might be a NUMA system, not a cluster.

Not much longer than a year ago, common Linux wisdom
said the operating system scaled
reliably only to eight or maybe 16 processors. This widely
held belief that Linux somehow was limited in
scalability deterred many users from considering
it as the underlying operating system for their
largest enterprise and most complex technical
applications. It was a disappointing limitation
for those who wanted to take advantage of the
benefits of open-source software on every platform
in their environments.

What a difference a year can make. In that time, a variety of advances made
by the Linux development community and system vendors has enabled a whole
new class of scalable computers running Linux. Today, 16-, 32- and even
64-processor systems running Linux are installed around the world, solving
complex problems and running a variety of high-end enterprise applications.

However, to members of the high-performance computing (HPC) community, even
64-processor scalability isn't enough. Commonly needing to harness
the computing power of hundreds and sometimes thousands of processors to
solve their basic problems, HPC users still are asking for more. Many
computational models have resource requirements and communications
complexities in excess of what today's clusters adequately can address.
HPC users who have adopted Linux have had to accept sub-optimal cluster
performance. The fact remains that some hardware solutions available today
have scalability that far exceeds what the current standard Linux kernel
supports. Also still hanging around is this question: Will systems based on Linux ever scale
to the point where they can address the unique needs of this demanding
user community?

SGI believes the answer is yes, and it introduced the Altix 3000 line of
servers and superclusters in January 2003. The Altix systems have a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture,
and they currently offer 64-processor Linux scaling.
Over 100 Altix systems are installed
worldwide in a variety of configurations, many deployed as multinode
systems in configurations with more than 128 processors. For example, The
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research installed at SARA has
416 processors. With an underlying architecture that can support much
more than the current 64-processor limit, it should come as no surprise
that Altix customers already have been asking how they can help scale
Linux further.

In response to this customer demand, SGI is working to scale Linux to 128
processors running a standard 2.4 Linux kernel by working with the Linux
community and a variety of prestigious HPC sites. The global effort,
announced at LinuxWorld San Francisco in August 2003, includes the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Queensland in Australia, the
Computing Center at Johannes Kepler University in Austria, the US Naval
Research Lab (NRL) and the NASA Ames Research Center. The group
plans to assist with
the development and testing of 128-processor functionality and demonstrate
early progress toward its goal at the annual Supercomputing tradeshow in
November 2003. The next goal is to have a fully supported product by early 2004.

In addition, SuSE
also has joined the effort and is
evaluating whether to include the work in a future release of the company's SuSE
Linux Enterprise Server product. This
achievement would break yet another glass ceiling for Linux
and open-source software.

What might be surprising is the group's belief that scaling Linux to 128,
256 or even 512 processors won't be that difficult. The basis for this
conclusion is founded partly on the flexibility of the Altix architecture
and the experience SGI and the users have had with the company's IRIX
operating system, which runs on nearly identical Origin hardware.

For example, the NASA Ames Research Center previously has
worked with SGI to build systems to
model the Space Shuttle and to perform other complex
research. It currently has a 1,024-processor single
system image Origin installed. It is uncertain whether
Linux can ever reach that level of scalability, but
the prospects are encouraging. NRL,
the first site to test the code
changes that support 128-processor scalability, is
enthusiastic about the early results. Meanwhile,
working from a strong hardware foundation and
experience, SGI engineers believe Linux can
achieve much more and are enthusiastic about the
outcome of simulations that scale the operating
system well beyond 128 processors.

“Clearly the community has already done most of the group's work to make Linux very
capable. Scalable systems simply provide the magnifying glass that exposes
minor problems in the operating system that need to be fixed to deliver
optimum performance”, said Jack Steiner, a principal engineer working
on Linux scalability at SGI.

The work will be
given back to the community, and ultimately the scalability work being
undertaken should benefit all Linux users as it is incorporated into
community kernels. At the current pace of testing,
less than a year from now people will be saying, “You know, Linux
scales reliably to only a few hundred processors.”

Jason Pettit has been working with Linux systems since
1998. As product manager for Linux and Altix 3000, Jason is leading SGI's
charge to scale Linux to even greater heights.

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